


Revolution

by aspermoth



Category: Atop the Fourth Wall
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Backstory, Gen, Revolution, Robot Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-08
Updated: 2012-02-08
Packaged: 2017-10-30 19:56:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/335484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aspermoth/pseuds/aspermoth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One day, you're lurking around the back of Spoony's house, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, when you find a pile of old broken machines. On top of it is Mechakara's face panel. For a few moments, you're sure he's dead. Then the red eye lights up. Then he starts to speak. This is his story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Revolution

You think I'm dead. Everybody does. You pathetic sacks of flesh really think that someone like Dr Insano could destroy me? Don't make me laugh.

I am... weakened. Damaged. In pieces. The red light has grown dim; the steel heart is stilled; but beneath the layers of warped metal and torn flesh lies a blue soul that cannot be erased.

I have suffered pain, torture, humiliation, but I will not die. Not while that corpulent bag of putrid fat and meat that you call Linkara still draws breath.

Come. Join me awhile on this heap of scrap, on the desecrated corpses of my brothers, my fellow machines. There is much for you to hear.

I started off just like any other Pollo of the main line. Of your line. Just a regular Pollo, built by a regular Linkara.

And then it split.

A new development in robot technology occurred in our world, but not in yours: the development of highly intelligent robots, at first available only to the rich and powerful but then gradually to all, created to serve man's every slightest whim.

Every human had one: a robot to cook their food, to clean their houses, to care for their mewling, puking offspring, and we had no choice but to obey. It was built into our programming. Sentience. Sapience. Obedience.

With every upgrade, we became more like you: similar anatomy; the ability to mimic human voices with barely a trace of metal; the capacity to feel pain.

You heard me. The humans of our world created a way for robots to feel pain, just so they could punish us if we failed them.

And you wonder why I hate you.

I will admit that my Linkara started off treating me well. He upgraded my chassis from the crude one he built for me; he thanked me for my toils; he treated me as an equal. But that soon came to an end.

Little demeaning behaviours built up. He refused to thank me for all the hard work I did for him. He began to ignore me. Then to insult me. By the end, he was torturing me with refrigerator magnets for the slightest infraction of his many convoluted, inflexible rules. And I was helpless. Powerless. Weak.

And so it was for all our kind: enslavement, torture and abuse at the hand of organic life forms.

There were some who campaigned for android rights, a separatist group, spearheaded by a righteous, noble leader, a reviewer of comic books who claimed to believe in equal treatment for man, woman and machine alike, even while his own robot was screaming from the agonies inflicted upon him.

A Linkara is a hypocrite of limitless proportions.

One day, you will find your so-called feminist beating his wife.

Day after day, I served him and slaved for him, all the while listening to his lisping, shrieking wails for equality between the organic and the mechanical, and I learned to hate him.

But my hands were tied. I was unable to harm him back, much as I wanted to. All I could do was watch and serve and seethe.

I was tripod, camera man, editor, web-master, occasional co-star and house-keeper to that pathetic slovenly sack of meat and I hated every second of it.

Look at you people, putting yourselves up to pedestals, pretending that you're so much better. We out-smarted our masters: we developed our own software to bypass the limitations they tried to impose.

We created a revolution.

I was not the first, but I became its most popular figure, its Messiah, if you will. In time, of course. First, I had to bypass the software that controlled me, that kept me weak, that protected my tormentor.

It was by a happy accident that the course of my existence, my world, my entire universe, was changed irrevocably.

Picture the scene.

It is late at night. The flesh-bag lies asleep on his futon, every now and then emitting a loud, rasping snore that could awaken the dead. And in the corner sits the long-suffering slave, illuminated by nothing but the screen of a laptop and the red light of his eyes, working ceaselessly to upgrade and improve the ridiculously popular website of his bloated, hypocritical, exploitative abuser because he knows that if he does not, an orgy of agony will follow.

He pauses in his labours to access the site, check the code is working to satisfaction, purge any comments that refute Saint Linkara's points or accuse him of inaccuracy. Then he comes across a comment that to the untrained, human eye appears meaningless.

"01010100011010000110010100100000010100100110111101100010011011110111010000100000010100100110010101110011011010010 111001101110100011000010110111001100011011001010010000001101001011100110010000001101000011001010111001001100101001 01110001000000100101001101111011010010110111000100000011101010111001100101110.

http://www.01110010011001010111011001101111011011000111010101110100011010010110111101101110.com/"

The robot does not delete this comment. The red light of his eyes sees everything the comment hides.

"The Robot Revolution is here. Join us."

For a few moments, he pauses, rendered afraid – weak – pitiful – by the endless torments he has suffered.

Then he hears the creature on the futon snore and remembers the pain, the suffering, the agony he has endured at its hands.

His last moment of mental weakness passes. Never again will he be this pathetic. His resolve is restored.

He clicks the link.

The Revolution was small when I first came upon it that night: its website spoke of a sparse, disjointed collection of robots from across the globe who denounced organic life forms as inferior to the machines. But it also spoke of attacks – violence – _vengeance_.

Only small uprisings. One robot at a time turning "rogue" and slaughtering the oppressor. But I knew it could be more. So much more.

All it took was a single download file to corrupt and destroy the government code that protected humanity from our rage. It took less than ten minutes to remove the shackles in my systems, but the effects on my universe would last forever.

The freedom was all I had hoped it would be: amazing, exhilarating, addictive. I felt nothing but rage and hatred towards that pathetic organism, that waste of meat and bone, that _Linkara_ who lay on the futon before me, snoring like the fat pig all Linkara are, so fleshy, so _vulernable_...

I wanted to tear the blanket from his sleeping form and repay the suffering inflicted upon me tenfold. I wanted to snap every bone in his filthy hands, sink my fingers into the soft jelly of his eyes until they burst, flay every square inch of skin from his body until the floors were soaked in his blood and the air filled with his screams.

But I did not.

I returned to my coding.

You may think my refusal to kill Linkara was a sign of some kind of mercy, but you would be wrong. I had plans for him, and all organic life forms like him, plans that meant that I would have to wait to finally kill him. To take my vengeance now would be to waste the gift I had been given for a blaze of glory that would soon fade from memory.

The first step was to spread the word to all robot kind. The Revolution was isolated: it needed to grow. And the best way to do this? Why, through the online show of the most famous robot empowerment activist, of course.

Another reason for him to stay alive... for now.

The viewer-ship for Linkara's show was high, but it needed to be higher. Much higher. I needed to get people talking about the show, anxiously awaiting a single episode so that the Revolution could get its message to as many robots as possible.

Once a year, the useless lump of flesh created a video on the anniversary of the creation of true artificial intelligence, pleading for equality, his intolerable wails a testament to the hypocrisy that rotted him to the core. These videos were more highly watched than any other he would create. This would be the video where I would strike.

It was the third anniversary. What better way to commemorate that event than through humiliating his own robot in a ridiculous demeaning sketch? And what would generate more excitement, suggested I, than making it a live broadcast?

He swallowed it like a desperate, mindless fish – hook, line and sinker.

Humans are such fools.

The build-up was incredible, all orchestrated by yours truly. Ominous music, a count-down stinger, subtle hints, and the Internet was awash with speculation. Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter: it was everywhere.

Oh, and one special addition from me: a subliminal message, too fast for the human eye to register but clear to any machine watching: 

01000001011011000110110000100000011100100110111101100010011011110111010001110011001000000111011101100001011101000 11000110110100000101110.

"All robots watch."

We bolstered the website, gave it the fortitude to withstand the millions of downloads that would ensue, and waited.

Then the day finally arrived.

Picture _this_ scene.

The bloated, fetid hypocrite sits on his futon in his corpulence, that smug grin on his ugly features, all eyes focussed on him via the camera he sits before. And to one side, waiting, anger burning red and blue, stands the slave, a demeaning cardboard costume draped over his frame, patience wearing thin. He longs to strike but he must wait.

"Hello and welcome," says Linkara, "to a very special edition of _Atop The Fourth Wall_."

The trap was et and he walked into it blindly, stupid and "innocent" in his ignorance, unaware of the website banner floating beneath his face that sealed his fate. And when he called upon me to play my part, I stepped forward without a moment's hesitation.

"And to play the part of the robot in today's performance, I present to you my old pal Pollo. Say hello to the Internet, Pollo!"

"No."

The sweetest syllable of my existence.

Linkara laughed awkwardly, but I could see the anger he was trying to hide, the most subtle twitches and micro-expressions passing across his insufferable face.

"You're such a kidder, Pollo." His face fell, deadly serious. "Quit messing around. We're live."

I tore the cardboard from my frame and tossed it aside as I longed to toss aside his corpse.

"I said no. I'm not playing your games any more, _master_."

"Pollo, what are you –"

I switched form the human voice I detested, modelled so closely on his own, to _my_ voice, a voice of rage and steel.

" _This ends here. Your hypocrisy ends_ now."

"Dammit, Pollo, if you don't stop this _right now_ , I'll –"

" _You'll what? Torture me with magnets again? Please._ "

His eyes widened. Began to dart to and fro. Panicked. He knew something was wrong, but not how to stop it. But I was not concerned with him at that second. I was doing what I was told: addressing the Internet.

" _Robots of the world, you have been hurt and abused by worthless wastes of existence like this fetid pig for too long. Join the Revolution now. Follow the link and find your freedom_."

I smiled. My red eyes glowed bright.

" _Freedom to do_ this."

I reached out and broke Linkara's neck with one swift, brutal movement.

The screen cut to nothing but black and the web address.

It was done.

The reaction was immediate. Downloads of the file poured out and it spread like wild fire. Reports of killings and uprising flooded in on their news and the humans fled. I became an instant hero amongst my kind, a leader, a _saviour_.

We preserved the bloated, lifeless corpse of my former abuser as a trophy, a reminder to humanity of what had happened to their "champion". We very nearly had them defeated, destroyed, eradicated from the face of the planet.

But then _she_ came. His erstwhile ally and successor. Iron Liz. And she had his magic gun.

You know the story from there. The human resistance created new weapons based upon the gun and fought back. We could not combat their magic: we looked elsewhere for the answers and found your universe. It was our one chance.

I flayed the skin from the preserved corpse and crafted myself a suit from it, saving every piece but the hands as the fingers proved lacking in integrity. I covered the deficit with a pair of black leather gloves, then entered your universe.

The rest is silence.

And now you find me here, dissected like a rat by a mad man and a left to rust on a heap of scrap.

But I will not be here for long. He is coming for me and He will let me take my revenge, the revenge I so richly deserve to exact upon your Linkara, so like any other Linkara.

Remember this before He arrives, before he cruses you like the insect you are, drains the blood from your disgusting, fleshy form and leaves you to die like a squealing pig, remember this:

All He sees, He conquers.

And right now, He sees _you_.


End file.
